That's a common misconception; energy will matter anyhow. It's useful to think of industry as a three factor limitation of energy, materials and intelligence[1

That's a common misconception; energy will matter anyhow. It's useful to think of industry as a three factor limitation of energy, materials and intelligence[1] -- you are sort of always limited by one of them. If energy was of literal no concern, we could promptly utilize very inefficient carbon capture or even synthesize elements. Solar energy still has significant costs in labor (what I call intelligence) and materials, both of which are finite. We will always as a civilization be managing those factors, even with a seemingly unlimited source like a feasible fusion reactor (which would require an advanced highly costly and finite reactor to produce energy) to solar panels (which outsource the fusion to some 150 million km away producer :) ) A quick googling gives me about 24 MJ/kg for steel production. A compression cycle with, for example, 1cm of displacement would need to exert 2.4 GN or about 24 million tons of kg-force over a 1kg sample to use equivalent energy, which I believe is far above any press in existence. [1] Indeed we know the first two are equivalent via E=mc^2 , however this conversion constant is essentially prohibitive outside of stellar nucleus. We also know the third one, intelligence, can be built from raw materials and energy, so there's also a conversion factor there.